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Jobs had a dichotomous — almost bipolar — way of reacting to things: people, products, ideas. Something was either "the best thing ever" or awful. Relatedly, he was temperamental and mercurial in his behavior. Jobs's intensity encouraged a binary view of the world. Colleagues referred to the hero/shithead dichotomy. You were either one or the other, sometimes on the same day. The same was true of products, ideas, even food: Something was either “the best thing ever,” or it was shitty, brain-dead, inedible. As a result, any perceived flaw could set off a rant. The finish on a piece of metal, the curve of the head of a screw, the shade of blue on a box, the intuitiveness of a navigation screen—he would declare them to “completely suck” until that moment when he suddenly pronounced them “absolutely perfect.” He thought of himself as an artist, which he was, and he indulged in the temperament of one.---- Isaacson's main accomplishment is to give a vivid sense of Jobs's personality: his hero/shithead classification of people, his self-conception as a humanist and an artist, a focus so obsessive that he could put off his family and dealing with his cancer, and a venomous nastiness coexisting with a profound empathy. The biography ties in this portrait in with a careful history of Apple and its products — indeed, it moves very fluidly between the personal and the professional in Jobs's life, and explains how each shaped the other. But the most striking and new insights of the book focus on Jobs the person — what made him such an extraordinary, and extraordinary difficult, visionary. In this answer, I list ten of the most remarkable bits. ---- 2'''. Jobs had an extreme ability to focus and a '''passion for cutting away what he didn't want, both in allocating his own time and in designing products. This empowered but also crippled him. He could, for example, totally ignore family. (He almost never came to see his first daughter, Lisa, until she was about eight; "I didn't want to be a father, so I wasn't," he explained.) And, according to Isaacson, Jobs tarried in dealing with his cancer diagnosis. Jobs’s intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If something engaged him—the user interface for the original Macintosh, the design of the iPod and iPhone, getting music companies into the iTunes Store—he was relentless. But if he did not want to deal with something—a legal annoyance, a business issue, his cancer diagnosis, a family tug—he would resolutely ignore it. That focus allowed him to say no. He got Apple back on track by cutting all except a few core products. He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons, software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options. He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism. 3'''. To him, consumer engineering was inseparable from the humanities, especially music and visual design. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” Jobs said. “Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s '''a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.” 4'''. Jobs approached his business with an unusual perfectionism, insisting on controlling products end-to-end. He was a '''tinkerer more than an inventor, obsessively refining the look and feel of what he made. Often, that tinkering took something from a technical possibility to a wildly successful, mass-market product. His quest for perfection led to his compulsion for Apple to have end-to-end control of every product that it made. He got hives, or worse, when contemplating great Apple software running on another company’s crappy hardware, and he likewise was allergic to the thought of unapproved apps or content polluting the perfection of an Apple device. This ability to integrate hardware and software and content into one unified system enabled him to impose simplicity. (The New Yorker ''review, Steve Jobs’s Real Genius, by (echhh) Malcolm Gladwell, examines this aspect of Jobs. Thanks to Alex Teytelboym for pointing this out.) '''5'. Jobs had a "reality distortion field" — an uncanny extreme charisma that enabled him to bend situations and organizations to his will. When Andy Hertzfeld joined the Macintosh team, he got a briefing from Bud Tribble, the other software designer, about the huge amount of work that still needed to be done. Jobs wanted it finished by January 1982, less than a year away. “That’s crazy,” Hertzfeld said. “There’s no way.” Tribble said that Jobs would not accept any contrary facts. “The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek,” Tribble explained. “Steve has a reality distortion field.” When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “'In his presence, reality is malleable. '''He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules. '''6'. Jobs was harsh in his judgments of many things, technical and aesthetic, and was known for being nasty to his coworkers as well as to strangers. On a trip to London with Jobs, Jony Ive had the thankless task of choosing the hotel. He picked the Hempel, a tranquil five-star boutique hotel with a sophisticated minimalism that he thought Jobs would love. But as soon as they checked in, he braced himself, and sure enough his phone rang a minute later. “I hate my room,” Jobs declared. “It’s a piece of shit, let’s go.” So Ive gathered his luggage and went to the front desk, where Jobs bluntly told the shocked clerk what he thought. His venom was paired with a notable empathy that, in the view of some of Jobs's colleagues, made the meanness particularly unconscionable. Because Ive was so instinctively nice, he puzzled over why Jobs, whom he deeply liked, behaved as he did. One evening, in a San Francisco bar, he leaned forward with an earnest intensity and tried to analyze it: He’s a very, very sensitive guy. That’s one of the things that makes his antisocial behavior, his rudeness, so unconscionable.' I can understand why people who are thick-skinned and unfeeling can be rude, but not sensitive people.' I once asked him why he gets so mad about stuff. He said, “But I don’t stay mad.” He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn’t stay with him at all. But there are other times, I think honestly,' when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody'. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that. 7'''. According to Isaacson, '''Jobs had an eating disorder and other psychological issues that complicated the treatment of his cancer. He resisted having his depression treated, since for him treatment amounted to masking the truth of one's life. Isaacson argues that this dimension has been relatively underemphasized in the reporting on Jobs's illness. Jobs’s eating problems were exacerbated over the years by his psychological attitude toward food. When he was young, he learned that he could induce euphoria and ecstasy by fasting. So even though he knew that he should eat—his doctors were begging him to consume high-quality protein—lingering in the back of his subconscious, he admitted, was his instinct for fasting and for diets like Arnold Ehret’s fruit regimen that he had embraced as a teenager. wife, Laurene Powell kept telling him that it was crazy, even pointing out that Ehret had died at fifty-six when he stumbled and knocked his head, and she would get angry when he came to the table and just stared silently at his lap. “I wanted him to force himself to eat,” she said, “and it was incredibly tense at home.” Bryar Brown, their part-time cook, would still come in the afternoon and make an array of healthy dishes, but Jobs would touch his tongue to one or two dishes and then dismiss them all as inedible. One evening he announced, “I could probably eat a little pumpkin pie,” and the even-tempered Brown created a beautiful pie from scratch in an hour. Jobs ate only one bite, but Brown was thrilled.Powell talked to eating disorder specialists and psychiatrists, but her husband tended to shun them. He refused to take any medications, or be treated in any way, for his depression. “When you have feelings,” he said, “like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to lead an artificial life.” In fact he swung to the other extreme. He became morose, tearful, and dramatic as he lamented to all around him that he was about to die. The depression became part of the vicious cycle by making him even less likely to eat. 8'. Jobs was an exceptional visionary — a creative genius — who either created or totally transformed many big industries with his products and companies: personal computers (Apple II), graphical user interfaces (Macintosh), digital animation (Pixar), music hardware (the iPod), music distribution (iTunes), smartphones (the iPhone), and tablets (the iPad). Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead. '''Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now.'History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. '''9. Jobs repeatedly asked Isaacson to write his biography, and gave him free rein to write an honest, thorough account. I asked Jobs why he wanted me to be the one to write his biography. “I think you’re good at getting people to talk,” he replied. That was an unexpected answer. I knew that I would have to interview scores of people he had fired, abused, abandoned, or otherwise infuriated, and I feared he would not be comfortable with my getting them to talk. And indeed he did turn out to be skittish when word trickled back to him of people that I was interviewing. But after a couple of months, he began encouraging people to talk to me, even foes and former girlfriends. Nor did he try to put anything off-limits. “I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was twenty-three and the way I handled that,” he said. “'But I don't have any skeletons in my closet that can’t be allowed out.” He didn't seek any control over what I wrote, or even ask to read it in advance.' His only involvement came when my publisher was choosing the cover art. When he saw an early version of a proposed cover treatment, he disliked it so much that he asked to have input in designing a new version. I was both amused and willing, so I readily assented. ... He had never, in two years, asked anything about what I was putting in the book or what conclusions I had drawn. But now he looked at me and said, “I know there will be a lot in your book I won't like.” It was more a question than a statement, and when he stared at me for a response, I nodded, smiled, and said I was sure that would be true. “That’s good,” he said. “'Then it won't seem like an in-house book.' I won't read it for a while, because I don't want to get mad. Maybe I will read it in a year—if I'm still around.” By then, his eyes were closed and his energy gone, so I quietly took my leave. ... His wife also did not request any restrictions or control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I would publish. In fact she strongly encouraged me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “'There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy', and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn't whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” 10. Isaacson leaves the last words to Jobs himself: the biography ends with a few paragraphs of Jobs reflecting on his life and work, of which I quote two. Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn't invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me. All quotations are from Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2011). Emphasis mine.